Incompetence

I don't know most of my passwords

I don't know most of my email addresses


But I do know which site shared my email address with spammers

On using https mirrors

On confidentiality:

So that they don't know what's inside

Worse than no support

You are in need of support and you go ask in project x's forums (mailing list, online board, etc.) and get something worse than no support:

Responses from an incompetent with plenty of time and lots of FUD to spread.

Now that we have "umarell" thanks to Enrico Zini and other Italian folks, we need a name for the above.

Apologies to some readers who might be disappointed by this post. I don't like calling people names but I've seen too many of the above in less than two hours not to be tired.

Ten years-old ebook reader

I own a ten years-old ebook reader.

Is it a smartphone?
It has features that make it pretty much like one, except that it can't make phone calls. So no. (However, I dare to say that making phone calls is one of the least used features of smartphones nowadays. Perhaps in the feature smartphones won't even be phones anymore, due to atrophy.)

What is it then?
It is a Sony CLIÉ, a PEG-SJ22 to be more precise. A PDA running Palm OS 4.1 that I'm now using as an ebook reader. To my surprise, the Plucker and iSilo readers still exist and at least the latter seems somewhat alive - there is even a version for Android.

Nowadays there are ebook readers with electronic paper displays, wifi or 3G connectivity, and other features but they all come down to the same thing: an ebook reader. Truth be told, the technology is quite old. In 2004, a year after the release of the PEG-SJ22, Sony also released the LIBRIé EBR-1000EP in Japan, an ebook reader with a 6" electronic paper display. A few years later is was released in the US as the Sony Reader.

Certainly, there have been advances since those devices were first released, but I have yet to see something that is really innovating. This year we are back to wrist watches, which were first released more than ten years ago - and one of them even ran linux.

Netbooks also had devices like the PEG-UX50 as their ancestor.

And if you were thinking about shoes, you've arrived late: the Puma RS already had some chips in them, and the Adidas 1 were also sported a few years ago. World, it's time to innovate.

Chocolate quote

Kinda appropriate for some recent events:

Il y a autant de générosité à recevoir qu'à donner

- Julien Green

Roughly translated to

There is only as much generosity to receive as there is to give.

The death of the netbooks?

It's been over four years since I bought my ASUS Eee PC 1000h. I have used it almost daily ever since. Back when I bought it new models from different brands were being released every few months due to the netbooks hype.

In spite of being resource-limited due to its 1.60 GHz Atom CPU and only 1 GB of RAM, I've managed to do pretty much everything with it. Building software is slow and watching HD videos is nearly impossible, even more so when streamed from the internet and played with flash. Its limited memory capacity makes the kernel swap tens of megabytes before the KDE4 desktop is fully loaded. After launching some day-to-day applications there are usually hundreds of MBs in swap.

In spite of all this, I run the KDE4 desktop and have been able to do things such as running up to two Debian virtual machines with several services (apache httpd, mysql server, openldapd, squid, etc.) and a Windows XP one all at the same time, under virtualbox. I could have probably booted another Debian virtual machine but that would have most likely rendered the DE unusable. Oh, and did I say that this is under the "VT-x"-less N270 CPU?

This so-called netbook has proved to be rock-solid. Every component is still fully functional except for its 7-hours lasting battery that didn't stand a full year of day-to-day use. The keyboard is still intact and so is everything else.

Last year I thought I was going to have to seriously consider buying a replacement after seeing what I think are some signs of the end of its life: After a routinely deep cleanup the keyboard stopped working properly, to the point that I couldn't even login because half the keyboard would send the signal of a totally unrelated key. I bought an external, but still small, USB keyboard which I used until after the next deep-cleanup somehow made the built-in keyboard work again.

The second sign came soon after the keyboard issue. The AC adapter was, well, no longer supplying power to the machine. Trying to buy one online proved to be futile. Replacement supplies for ASUS equipment are hard to find here in Mexico and importing them from the US results in the item being twice (or more) as expensive due to import taxes. They are even more expensive when one finally adds up the cost of shipping.

Hopefully, after spending some hours hunting down the failure in the adapter it turned out to be a problem with the wires. Cut wires repaired, the adapter was working again. The unit itself wasn't at fault.

Back to 2013, this netbook is ageing and every time I've looked at potential replacements I've found none that I like. I look for another netbook/ultrabook/laptop/whatever that is rock-solid, with a 10.1" or 11" display, and has a similarly compact but not oh-so-small-that-I-can't-even-type-by-only-using-my-fingertips keyboard.

The only devices that have caught my eye are the ASUS transformers (with the dock). I'm not interested in a device that only has 1 GB of memory and something between 32 to 64 GB of storage, however. I'm limited enough with my eee's 160GB hdd.

For my needs, the pre-installed Android would have to go away and I guess it would be fun to get a transformer to run under a standard Debian linux kernel. Since I'm not interested in doing that kind of kernel work the transformers are out of the question.

Based on this I think I can only partially agree with Russell Coker when he states that

If tablet computers with hardware keyboards replace traditional Netbooks that's not really killing Netbooks but introducing a new version of the same thing.

Tablets with hardware keyboards may, perhaps, be the next generation of the less than 10" netbooks, but to date I've yet to see something with a display smaller than 13" that is an upgrade over the 1000h Eee I own.

Not your gsoc project

Thanks to Google, for some years now there has been the so-called Google Summer of Code programme. Quite an interesting project it is.

However, how many of the slots assigned to Debian have resulted in successful projects? how many of them were actually completed by the student and not by the mentor or somebody else? are those projects in fact used or useful at all?

All these questions occurred to me while wondering what would have happened if Joey Hess' git-annex-related kickstarter project had instead been a GSOC project. His kickstart was very successful by the way. Joey: many congratulations!

Not trying to point my finger to the (IMHO many) failed or unsuccessful Debian-related gsoc projects, but I wonder how many successful projects are developed outside the get-paid-in-exchange model. I suspect most, at least in Debian.

What's done for those who actually "deliver" while working on projects as a hobby? is it really worth having GSOC slots for Debian?